A living hall of story and craft
Or, Why “Content” Makes My Skin Crawl There’s a kind of quiet shock that happens when you stumble, mid-scroll, onto something real. You’ve been swimming through sludge for so long that your eyes have adjusted to the brown water — and then suddenly, there it is: a hand-carved boat, gliding on purpose. Maybe it’s a … Read more
Every so often I stop and ask myself why I write any of this at all. Why put private questions into public language? Why offer up my changing thoughts about religion, spirit, and the many worlds I move through? I know that writing about belief can make someone look like a teacher—or worse, like the … Read more
Back to the Ground: Leaving the Creator Economy The Vegas Strip of Socials When I finally stepped back toward art as a career, I did what everyone said you’re supposed to do: I walked straight onto the neon promenade of the platforms. It was all there — the carnival barkers with growth hacks, the slot … Read more
Escaping the Creator Economy and Breathing Again My feed felt like a mall food court during a fire drill — everyone juggling trays, alarms, ring lights, and a brand voice, while even the cows have adopted Gen Z cadence and a serotonin-deprived wink (and it must be said: this is not an indictment on Gen … Read more
Why I Left Social Media and Still Beat the Algorithm I left social media for the same reason people stop feeding slot machines: I got tired of watching it eat my quarters and call it “networking.” For years I played the game like everyone else. Post a sketch at peak hours. Reply fast. Learn the … Read more
Against Christianity-as-Nation and the Anti-Christic Costume I have stood in rooms that smelled like frankincense and brand-new carpet and heard the same sentence stitched in different fonts: Christ is King. Sometimes it was a chant, sometimes a caption, sometimes a way to end a conversation before it began. In each case it landed like a … Read more
It’s Not “Protestant Work Ethic” to Care About What You Make The Accusation of Effort It happens in a dozen small ways, usually wrapped in kindness, occasionally laced with smugness. Someone sees you working with focus—sanding a seam no one will see, re-throwing a vessel that’s almost right, rewriting a paragraph that would pass in … Read more
The Mystery of the Disappearing Job Title A few years ago, you could point at the screen and name what you were looking at. “Influencer” meant someone who monetized the soft power of attention; “content creator” meant someone who produced a steady stream of on-platform media to keep that attention fed. These were not slurs … Read more
Hey everyone, Just a quick heads-up — the site will be offline for a short maintenance window starting October 26 at 3am EST as we complete some upgrades. This move will give Ottawa Valley Creations a faster, more stable foundation and allow me to refine how orders are handled behind the scenes. Once everything is … Read more
The Joke That Isn’t a Joke Here’s a hilarity I didn’t order: my long, carefully structured essays about precarity, value, and the quiet violences of “content” get ten times the traffic of my actual handmade work. Google, apparently, is a connoisseur of fury—so long as the fury is arranged in clean paragraphs with descriptive subheads. … Read more